More than a fad, MCP is a reinvention of Smalltalk. Of course an automated agent doesn't want to communicate through other autonomous systems via text or binary protocols. There should be a unified way of executing high-level commands (i.e. message passing) to other systems. A global RPC mechanism, if you will.

MCP is simply a crappy implementation of this idea because our programming environments do not expose global remote function call mechanisms with well-defined protocols. The "everything is a file" idea is quite limiting these days.

Speaking of Smalltalk, I always imagined that you could integrate LLMs/actual artificial intelligence by giving them access to the internal data and telling them what you want to do, rather than calling a method. Instead of:

  a := Point x: 0 y: 0
  b := Point x: 5 y: 7
  distance := a distanceTo: b

You would do:

  a := Point x: 0 y: 0
  b := Point x: 5 y: 7
  distance := a llm: "You are a point object. Please calculate the distance to the argument." arg: b

Wouldn't that be neat? But alas, we're still writing software as if it's the 1970s.